RIP, iTunes

At long last, the demise of iTunes has come. On Monday, Apple announced that it will phase out the software once and for all. “If there’s one thing we hear over and over, it’s ‘Can iTunes do even more?’” quipped Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, onstage during the company’s annual developers conference. He then ran a demo of the trio of apps that will soon replace the platform: Music, TV, and Podcasts.

There are plenty of strategic reasons to put that poor 18-year-old software down to rest. Business-wise, this is all part of Apple’s strategy to transform into a bonafide entertainment studio. Separating different content into specialized platforms allows the company to promote its ever-growing slate of original programming, while expanding the possibilities for monthly subscription services. But even from the user perspective, iTunes has long felt old and clunky. What began as a music player meant to compete with winamp (rest its soul) has over the years become a bloated catch-all for every media file on a person’s computer. It lurches between music, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks, and blends confusing promotional subcategories like “For You” and “Browse” with a person’s permanent libraries. In its past few updates, it has grown only more confusing to navigate, becoming a constant flashpoint on Apple bulletin boards. I interact with iTunes in its current form in the same way that I interact with that one package of chicken that has become a permanent, icy fixture in the back of my freezer: accidentally and as infrequently as possible.

iTunes is the 8-track of the millennial generation: a mostly inefficient technology that bridged shifting eras of music distribution. The media player launched in January 2001, a little less than a year before the iPod, and laid the groundwork for a DIY listening experience that was no longer dictated by albums, or CDs, or buying music altogether. In the late ’90s, most teens’ exposure to artists was limited to the radio, Total Request Live, and what they could afford at their local Sam Goody. iTunes’s easy-to-use CD-burning capabilities, paired with rising peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster (and Limewire, and Kazaa), broke open the possibilities of what a young internet-savvy music fan could listen to—basically anything, anytime—and paved the way for the on-demand streaming services we have today.

Though iTunes quite famously became the first major platform to sell songs for a dollar, most millennials of a certain age used the program as a laundering system for illegally downloaded music. The ritual went like this: (1) find the right moment to capitalize the family room computer—preferably a late evening when the little download progress bars from your P2P network could stretch uninterrupted into the night— and jumpstart as many illegal downloads as you possibly could without crashing your computer, (2) go to bed, (3) harvest your mp3s in the morning, discarding the specimen that languished in an unsteady DSL connection, (4) transfer the completed files to your library, and (5) transfer them onto a CD or iPod, for mobile consumption. (Note: steps 1 through 3 could be skipped if you happened to be sourcing your music from a CD you rented from your local library.)

The fourth step of that process was the most time-intensive form of data entry that I’ve endured in my entire life. It was important—no, necessary—that the names and titles and album art of every song I stole from the internet looked as if it had arrived there legitimately. Standard capitalization. No symbols. No electronic signature from the downloader. I vaguely recall a get-off-my-lawn narrative at the time, suggesting that all these free-flowing mp3s were bound to leave us directionless and musically inept—listening to stray songs with no appreciation of the album or discography from which they came. But if anything, all those hours of editing were like a musical boot camp, an accelerated way to catalog discographies both in my digital library and my mind. Of course, there was always the chance that when you finally got around to listening to the hours and hours of music you’d stolen, a song would rudely be interrupted by grating static, or Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Napster was free, yes, but full of trolls.

The end goal, I suppose, was ownership. As a teen, you strive to assert an identity separate from your family at every opportunity possible, all while living under their close supervision. The ability to amass as much music as your hard drive could shoulder meant a listening experience tailored to your own personal tastes. Not the radio. Not MTV. Not what was in your parents’ CD collection. Your stuff. And when I finally got my hands on an iPod, it was a little like carrying around a comfort blanket. My iTunes library was my identity, and I spent hours cherishing and growing it.

by Alyssa Bereznak , The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration

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Too Many People Want to Travel

Late in May, the Louvre closed. The museum’s workers walked out, arguing that overcrowding at the home of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo had made the place dangerous and unmanageable. “The Louvre suffocates,” the workers’ union said in a statement written in French, citing the “total inadequacy” of the museum’s facilities to manage the high volume of visitors.

Half a world away, a conga line of mountaineers waited to approach the summit of Mount Everest, queued up on a knife’s-edge ridge, looking as if they had chosen to hit the DMV at lunchtime. A photograph of the pileup went viral; nearly a dozen climbers died, with guides and survivors arguing that overcrowding at the world’s highest peak was a primary cause, if not the only one.

Such incidents are not isolated. Crowds of Instagrammers caused a public-safety debacle during a California poppy super bloom. An “extreme environmental crisis” fomented a “summer of action” against visitors to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Barcelona and Venice and Reykjavik and Dubrovnik, inundated. Beaches in Thailand and Mexico and the Philippines, destroyed. Natural wonders from the Sierra Nevadas to the Andes, jeopardized. Religious sites from Cambodia to India to Rome, damaged.

This phenomenon is known as overtourism, and like breakfast margaritas on an all-inclusive cruise, it is suddenly everywhere. A confluence of macroeconomic factors and changing business trends have led more tourists crowding to popular destinations. That has led to environmental degradation, dangerous conditions, and the immiseration and pricing-out of locals in many places. And it has cities around the world asking one question: Is there anything to be done about being too popular?

Locals have of course complained about tourists since time immemorial, and the masses have disrespected, thronged, and vandalized wonders natural and fabricated for as long as they have been visiting them. But tourism as we know it was a much more limited affair until recent decades. Through the early 19th century, travel for personal fulfillment was the provenance of “wealthy nobles and educated professionals” only, people for whom it was a “demonstrative expression of their social class, which communicated power, status, money and leisure,” as one history of tourism notes. It was only in the 1840s that commercialized mass tourism developed, growing as the middle class grew.

If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations—30 million visitors a year to Barcelona, population 1.6 million; 20 million visitors to Venice, population 50,000. La Rambla and the Piazza San Marco fit only so many people, and the summertime now seems like a test to find out just how many that is.

The root cause of this surge in tourism is macroeconomic. The middle class is global now, and tens of millions of people have acquired the means to travel over the past few decades. China is responsible for much of this growth, with the number of overseas trips made by its citizens rising from 10.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 156 million last year. But it is not solely responsible. International-tourist arrivals around the world have gone from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today: Mass tourism, again, is a very new thing and a very big thing.

by Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Charles Platiau/Reuters

King Weir

The first thing I want to talk to Bob Weir about is the dead.

Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.

“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.

We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.

Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. “He had a full-on Yosemite Sam mustache. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. On account of all the beard. (...)

“This motion”—he mimics strumming a guitar—“this one limited motion, repeated a million times, has turned my right rhomboid muscle into a strip of gristle that gets extremely painful after a couple of hours, to the point where it's like trying to play with an ice pick in your back. I went to doctors. I went to physical therapists. But the only thing that really worked was opiates, and so I got good and strung out on them. I would have to come home and go through withdrawal after every tour.”

He's always used alcohol, too—wine, in particular—to combat stage fright, a condition he says he shared with Garcia. “Every night, before I go on, it's I can't believe I put myself in this position again. Thousands of times.” He is so self-conscious about his playing before warming up that he needs to do so in solitude.

Weir's struggles became publicly apparent in 2013, when he collapsed onstage with Furthur. The next year, RatDog called off an entire tour. Today he is, to all appearances, healthy. He has replaced a drink before getting onstage with a shot of ginseng and, for the most part, pharmaceutical painkillers with herbal supplements. But he stops short of saying he's sober.

“I've tried that, and I'm not as happy as when I drink,” he says. He is adamant that he is able to have a glass of wine these days and stop there. Likewise, the occasional painkiller when the exercise and herbal remedies prove inadequate.

“There was a time, way back, when getting trashed and completely nuts was, I felt, my best approach to the blank page—which is a horrifying prospect in and of itself,” he says. “But I've been there and done that, and I don't think there is anything more to be found there for me. What I want now is to be in the same frame of mind when I wake up in the morning as when I went to bed. That's pretty much how I operate.”

This flies in the face of conventional thinking about how addiction works, but Weir says he's not cut out for traditional 12-step programs. “I'm not sure I buy the basic tenet, which is that you're powerless,” he says. “I think that we humans are enormously powerful, and I tend to think there's nothing that you can't do. It's a matter of self-mastery, and if self-mastery amounts to total abstinence, I think that's incomplete. I think you're selling yourself short. But I get that that's real dangerous for some people. So I don't talk about it much.” (...)

In New Orleans, Weir had told me a story to illustrate how, by the end, addiction and the pressures of fame had conspired to shrink Garcia's life.

“One time we came here after a long absence, and our publicist, who was also a good friend, asked Jerry how was it getting back to New Orleans, because it's such a great music town,” he said. “Jerry's answer was, ‘Well, one hotel's the same as another.’ That was pretty much the life he was given.”

We sat there for a few moments, listening to the bus's air-conditioning hum, sunlight peeking in around the edges of the blackout curtains.

“Yeah, well,” Weir said dryly, “I don't get out much, either.” (...)

There is a sequence in the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir in which various musical admirers struggle to describe Weir's style of rhythm guitar, falling back on such terms as “unique,” “unusual,” and “strange.” It would be easy to conclude that these were euphemisms, but it's apparently not so. When I ask Don Was about it, he is silent for several seconds.

“I've spent hundred of hours focused on him in the past few months, and he's still absolutely enigmatic to me,” Was says. “He's part Segovia and part John Lee Hooker, and he does both simultaneously—this exotic blend of the raw and the cerebral. He obliterates the lines between rhythm guitar and lead guitar. He doesn't just bash out chords—his rhythm parts are really melodic, so they also serve as lead parts. Sometimes I think there's a second guitarist sitting in, because he can also play separate lead lines and rhythm parts at the same time.”

This is reminiscent of Weir's description of his lifelong dyslexia, how words on the page, as he tells it, refuse to hold their shape and meaning, threatening always to go off in some new direction. “I let my brain run, I guess. I let it go and have more freedom than some folks do,” he says. “So if I'm reading a word, there are innumerable considerations to take into account about what I just read.”

According to Mickey Hart, “He became totally unique because he was in a band that was totally unique! Remember that Bobby had to play under the shadow of Jerry. It was a benevolent shadow, but that was challenging. Once Jerry got cranked up, he could really take a band away. So Bob had to learn a new way of playing. He had to re-invent himself as this partner, this other side to Jerry. He started playing strange.”

“I derived a lot of what I do on guitar from listening to piano players,” Weir says, citing McCoy Tyner's work with John Coltrane in particular. “He would constantly nudge and coax amazing stuff out of Coltrane.”

He says Garcia is still present when he plays. “I can hear him: ‘Don't go there. Don't go there,’ or ‘Go here. Go here.’ And either I listen or I don't, depending on how I'm feeling. But it's always ‘How's old Jerry going to feel about this riff?’ Sometimes I know he'd hate it. But he'd adjust.”

by Brett Martin, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Adrian Boot
[ed. A greatly underrated guitarist.]

Congressman Duncan Hunter Says He Probably Killed "Hundred of Civilians" in Iraq

California representative Duncan Hunter has been very vocal in his defense of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of stabbing an injured captive to death in Iraq. In a recent interview on a Barstool Sports podcast, Hunter said, "I frankly don’t care if he was killed. I just don’t care. And that’s my personal point of view. And as a congressman, that’s my prerogative to help a guy out like that. If—even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think."

Hunter's making an unusual and pretty extreme argument for why Gallagher shouldn't be held responsible for the war crimes charges he's facing—by claiming it's a non-issue because he's done the same. "I was an artillery officer," he said. "And we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians, if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians. Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged, too?" Probably yes.

According to CNN, Gallagher also reportedly "shot at noncombatants, posed for a photo and performed his re-enlistment ceremony next to a corpse." The biggest difference between what the two men did, Hunter seems to be arguing, is a technical one: Hunter's artillery unit was following orders while Gallagher wasn't.

Hunter isn't the only high-profile conservative veteran arguing that what Gallagher did isn't remarkable enough to hold him accountable for it. Fox News contributor and veteran Pete Hegseth has been defending Gallagher in private phone calls to Donald Trump, according to the Daily Beast. (Trump reportedly so trusts Hegseth that he nearly appointed him head of Veterans Affairs.) In a Fox & Friends Weekend segment with Hunter, Hegseth said, "If he committed premeditated murder, then Duncan did as well, then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?"

Gallagher is one of several accused U.S. war criminals that Donald Trump is considering giving presidential pardons, along with a Blackwater mercenary who reportedly opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi civilians and Army Ranger Michael Behenna who reportedly murdered a prisoner he was tasked with transporting. The American Civil Liberties Union has called the pardons "an endorsement of murder."

by Luke Darby, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Bill Clark

[ed. Yeah, this guy. What a piece of work. The only conclusion I can come to is it has to be some long-term US strategy to inflame as many Middle-Eastern jihadists as possible to justify our massive military-industrial spending (which at last count, totalled $750 billion/yr. - and that's just for "Defense", not counting Homeland Security, NSA, ICE, CIA, and all the "foreign aid" we bestow on other countries).

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Jonathan Gardner - The Ballroom 2019
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Kelp Has Been Slow To Catch On

A few years ago, many news stories announced that "kelp is the new kale." That the global seaweed harvest is worth more than lemons and limes. That it's the "next great food craze." And that it will be "everywhere by the next decade."

Where are we now?

Kelp is a type of seaweed that grows in large underwater forests and looks a little like green lasagna noodles with curly edges.

Seaweed farming has a lot going for it: It doesn't require any fertilizer, can actually be used as fertilizer, helps fight climate change, and cleans up ocean water by taking in nitrogen compounds. It's also a nutritious sea vegetable — rich in vitamins C and K and minerals like iron and calcium.

But now, the growing industry in the U.S. needs to build infrastructure and to change people's tastes on a larger scale.

Bren Smith is a leading advocate for what he calls restorative ocean farming — growing seaweed alongside shellfish like mussels and oysters, which absorb carbon dioxide and nitrogen compounds, protect shorelines from storm surges, and rebuild marine ecosystems. He co-founded a nonprofit called GreenWave to promote the movement and train aspiring farmers.

"The momentum's been unbelievable ... we have requests to start farms in every coastal state in North America, 20 countries around the world," Smith says.

Smith's farm is just off the coast of Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. There are now farms up and down the New England coast, with more getting started in California and the Pacific Northwest.

"We're growing, and people are eating it," Smith says. "This isn't like a cute little Brooklyn bee farm project creating nice little bottles of honey at the farmers market. ... There are hundreds of thousands of pounds being produced and sold at this point."

Kelp can be used as a pasta substitute, as noodles, sautéed with butter and mushrooms, or ground into powder to use as seasoning. High end restaurants have also used seaweed as a side vegetable and on cookies.

However, some industry specialists say growing seaweed has become perhaps too popular. Anoushka Concepcion is an assistant extension educator with the Connecticut Sea Grant; she works with seafood producers and researchers and answers questions about the latest technology and trends.

"The idea sort of took off before all the practical challenges could be addressed," Concepcion says. "Farmers are finding it difficult now just to get rid of their seaweed."

by Alan Yu, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Flip Nicklin/Plainpicture via

A Kafkaesque List of Things

Today is the 95th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. And I love Franz Kafka. He was one of my earliest literary obsessions—I even read Philip Roth’s The Breast, for him. I know: sacrifice. So on the day of his death, I decided to grease (if only slightly) what really must be a constant spinning of his corpse in his grave by collating a number of things that we, as a societal group, have decided to count as “Kafkaesque.”

Many people have pointed out that the term “Kafkaesque” is grossly overused. Others have noted how it is quite often misused. For the record, in 1991, Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way:

What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

Other definitions suggest that it describes something with “oppressive or nightmarish qualities,” or “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Sure, all of the above. Maybe the problem is that the term only technically (or at least etymologically) means “like Kafka,” so it could really refer to any element the user has identified both in the writer’s work and in the world.

But that’s no really excuse for the following list of things that have been called, at one time or another, “Kafkaesque”—from the deadly serious to the extremely silly, from the actually Kafkaesque to the merely annoying. I present this list with my apologies to Franz.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”

Seinfeld

Sex with Alvy Singer

Online outrage

Customer service

(Especially Comcast’s customer service)

Hookup culture

Breaking Bad, Season 3, Episode 9

The NSA

The no-fly list

Ikea

Bond court

The California housing crisis

The comparison of Justin Bieber to Brad Pitt

by Emily Temple, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: Andy Warhol

The Annuity Trap That Teachers Need to Avoid

Tony Isola was the kind of guy other teachers liked to approach for help with their retirement plans. Which investments should they be in? They felt Tony would know, because he used to be a currency trader, and because his wife, Dina Isola, worked on Wall Street. Plus, a guy who could teach social studies to hormone-addled middle schoolers was good at making simple financial concepts intelligible.

“Ask me a question, and I’ll give you the answer,” he’d say. “Usually, it’s ‘I don’t know.’ ” But his colleagues didn’t even know where to start. So, save regularly, he told them. Stay in the market through thick and thin—it will reward you. “Focus on things you have control over: Your costs. Your behavior.” They asked Tony to look at their statements.

He couldn’t believe what he saw. Many of his fellow teachers were in high-cost annuities, lured by tax-deferred growth and a lifetime stream of income. It made no sense—savers don’t need income; they need growth. And they don’t need tax-deferred products, since their retirement plans were already tax shelters. For these unnecessary “features,” the annuities imposed high sales charges on every paycheck withdrawal. And a 2% annual management fee. And large surrender fees of, say, 7%.

Why was this even possible? Teacher retirement plans, known as 403(b)s, are similar to private-sector 401(k)s, with one important difference: Because they evolved separately, they are exempt from protections of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. That act says 401(k) plan providers have a fiduciary duty to participants—in other words, they have to put the investors’ interests first. Teachers’ 403(b) plans are sold directly to individuals, rather than to employers, so the interest of the salesman was coming first. “Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher and they’ve given you a 400-page prospectus about variable annuities,” Tony says. That’s why three-quarters of $1 trillion in 403(b) plans are in annuities, which enjoy record sales. Insurance is a high-commission business, which you can see from Tony’s Twitter feed, where he likes to share screenshots of insurance agent literature. One says “6% commission.…Finally! A short-term FA that pays you the commission you deserve.”

Dina, too, was horrified. At firms where she had worked, brokers were rewarded with lavish vacations for beating sales quotas. When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a broker tried to make her mother liquidate their portfolio, creating an unneeded tax bill.

Thus began a journey to educate teachers about retirement and to push for reforms—specifically, that 403(b) investors should have the same protections as people in 401(k) plans. In 2005, Tony began offering financial planning while keeping his social-studies job. A couple of years later, after their twins turned three and Dina left her job in financial communications, she joined his advisory firm. They both started blogs: His is called A Teachable Moment, and hers, Real$martica. In 2015, Tony decided to work full-time as an advisor. He and Dina joined Ritholtz Asset Management, specifically to manage 403(b) plans. Operating from Stony Brook, N.Y., they manage $100 million in assets, including $12 million in 403(b) plans for teachers. Using index funds, they average 0.62% in annual fees in each account. There is no account minimum for 403(b) plans.

The stories continued to make their heads spin. How high were the fees? One young teacher was paying 3% a year to own the market, with a guarantee that he’d get his original investment at the end of 20 years. Dina shook her head. There has never been a 20-year period in the stock market’s history when it has lost value. Another teacher was paying $2,418 a year in fees on an $80,000 account. To get out, she needed to pay $3,000 in surrender fees.

by Leslie P. Norton, Barron's |  Read more:

Image: Twitter
[ed. See also: Confusing Options May Be Coming to Your 401(k). It Could Cost You. (NY Times).]

Jackson Browne

Our College Sports System is Broken

The college admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues has served up a powerful cocktail of outrage and schadenfreude. We’ve witnessed unabashed “Aunt Becky” blithely signing autographs outside Boston’s federal courthouse and learned about CEO dads staging photos of their fake-athlete kids as haplessly as Mr. Felicity Huffman’s car salesman character in Fargoattempted fraud with his pencil.

The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.

Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.

So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.

The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.

It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?

The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.

Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.

Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.

The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”

by Neil Swidey, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Adobe Stock

Am I Too Poor to Play Golf?

A few years back, I was traveling down the West Coast when I realized I was near a famous course. For the heck of it, I went online to check if a last-minute tee time was available. I can’t recall if I could get on, but I remember doing a double take at the green fee, which was slightly more than my weekly salary.

Looking back, I’m shocked at how shocked I was. What was I expecting? It costs me at least $80 to play at my local courses. It stands to reason I might need to borrow against my 401k to play a world-renowned course.

Eighty dollars is about the average weekend rate for the three public golf courses closest to me, one of which is a city-run venue. That’s just for the tee time; if I want to grab a hot dog and Coke at the turn, or a couple drinks after the round, add another $20. Forget hobby; at those prices, golf really is an addiction.

I have a stable income with my family’s business, and I’m good at it, too, recognized as one of the Top 40 Under 40 in my industry. My wife has a steady job as well. At first glance, we shouldn’t have to think twice about our recreation budget. However, we own a home, have car and school payments, and are saving to start a family—realities most young couples face. That we reside in Connecticut, one of the most expensive states for living in the country, doesn’t help. In short, dropping $80 for 18 holes is a difficult decision for me. (...)

Am I too poor to play golf?

That’s not self-pity; my friends—all relatively in the same tax bracket—discuss it as well. I know I’m well off compared to a lot of people, but golf makes me question that.

It’s a feeling that can lead to cognitive dissonance when my friends and I play. Instead of standing on the first tee ready for our round, we think, Well, let’s hope this is worth it, because there goes getting dinner and a movie. It’s hard enough to hit the fairway as is. Add that thought, and, well, no wonder my scores stink. (Maybe I’d consider taking lessons if they weren’t $120 an hour.)

When I hear about initiatives designed to grow the game—which typically include faster pace or ancillary-themed activities like Topgolf—they don’t resonate with my friends and me. If we want to make golf more accessible, that conversation starts and ends with lowering the cost of entry.

Many public courses have junior rates and programs that make the game affordable for kids, which is great. But once kids turn 18 years old, they’re often out of luck. Why can’t more courses designate a day or league, or perhaps six and 12-hole rounds, at lower prices? There are pockets around the country with such endeavors, and The First Tee does its part at the youth level, but it hasn’t spread around the country yet.

Yes, it will attract inexperienced golfers, which brings its share of etiquette breaches and slow play, but new customers are something the game needs. Discounted greens fees could be exactly what’s needed to open the funnel.

What’s worse, some of the public club pros and workers understand this, but far too often these decisions are made by public administrators, not golf-specific officials. It’s tough to get that conversation started when they view the sport not as a passion but as a number in the accounting books.

In Scotland, the home of golf, it really is the people’s game. Residents can access some of the best courses in the world for $200 a year, and there are no cart fees, because only the disabled ride. Players aren’t passed on the unnecessary maintenance costs: Scottish links depend on nature, not sprinkler systems, for water, and if there’s not much rain in a summer, well, the fairways will be rolling. Last I checked, things are still going strong over there. Some of the tenets are being applied in the United States, but nowhere near the scale it needs to be successful.

by Brian Zimmerli (with Joel Beall), Golf Digest |  Read more:
Image: Guy Billout
[ed. It's always been a problem. What's really frustrating is to pay crazy prices then feel like you're stuck in a traffic jam once you get on the course.]

Fleabag: Season 2

The Pain and Pleasure of the ‘Fleabag’ Dinner Party From Hell (Eater)

[ed. Such a good show. I especially like her relationship with her sister Claire (the meditation retreat in the first season was totally bonkers.] See also: When Your Dad Gets You Therapy For Your Birthday]

Peter Tosh

Repost

The Fed's Dangerous 'New Normal'

The American public doesn’t have much appetite for monetary matters, and most of that limited attention has been riveted on the political fights over President Donald Trump’s controversial nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. But there’s a far more serious piece of news on the Fed front.

The Fed’s once-revered independence and traditional controls on government spending have been dangerously eroded, with almost no public notice or debate. And unless the Fed itself or Congress does something about it, our financial system is at risk.

When did this happen? In a news conference in March, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would stop unwinding its balance sheet this September. That decision, phrased in the typically dry language of central bank news releases, didn’t make headlines. Yet it was a watershed: It was the most obvious sign yet that the Fed’s program to “normalize” monetary policy, as it had promised to do since 2009, was coming to an end. In essence, the Fed has decided to keep its emergency monetary powers and stick to its new methods of managing the supply of money in the economy indefinitely.

That “new normal,” which the Fed adopted during the financial crisis, includes novel methods for controlling interest rates. During the crisis, those methods allowed the Fed to engage in “quantitative easing,” meaning large-scale purchases of government bonds and other securities. But while they helped it fight the Great Recession, the Fed’s quantitative easing powers also fudged the traditional boundary line between fiscal policy, which Congress controls and which includes decisions about government funding, and monetary policy, which the Fed controls and which is supposed to be dedicated solely to fighting recessions and limiting inflation.

By blurring that boundary line, the Fed’s new methods threaten to undermine its critically important independence. An independent central bank ensures that neither the president nor Congress can decide to fund special projects or tweak economic growth by compelling the Fed to print more money. But the longer the Fed retains its “new normal,” the more that independence is at risk.

To understand why this new normal is so risky, you first need to understand how we got here.

Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed controlled inflation by creating or destroying bank reserves. When the Fed created reserves, interest rates declined, banks increased their lending and the supply of money in the economy expanded. When it supplied fewer reserves, it checked inflation.

But after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Fed started paying interest on banks’ reserves — the cash that banks must hold to meet reserve requirements and settle accounts with one another. Its goal was to get banks to stockpile reserves its emergency lending was creating instead of lending them, to avoid excessive money growth in the economy and prevent inflation. The decision to pay interest on reserves effectively allowed the Fed to control inflation no matter how many reserves it created — something it never could do before.

Second, in its first round of what later became known as quantitative easing, the Fed took the extraordinary move of buying large quantities of mortgage-backed securities from banks to keep their value from plummeting as the asset markets froze. In later rounds of quantitative easing, it also bought large amounts of long-term Treasury securities.

These two new policies left banks holding more than $2.5 trillion in reserves and quadrupling the overall size of the Fed’s assets. In the past, such a large increase in bank reserves would have led to high inflation. But the Fed could now avoid that result simply by making sure the rate it paid banks stayed high enough to get them to hoard any reserves the Fed created. That’s why quantitative easing hasn’t made prices skyrocket, as many Republicans feared it would when they were still a party of monetary hawks.

When quantitative easing began, then-Chairman Ben Bernanke promised that after the recession ended the Fed would revert to its “normal” self — meaning that the central bank would go back to a modest-size balance sheet and stop encouraging banks to hoard reserves. Later, the Fed released a normalization plan explaining how it would “unwind” its swollen balance sheet — letting it shrink as its bond holdings matured — and otherwise get back to business as usual.

Now that Powell has announced an end to that unwinding, is the Fed almost back to normal? Hardly. Far from resembling its precrisis self, it looks and operates much as it did in the worst days of the recession, bloated balance sheet and all. When Lehman Brothers failed, the Fed held $900 billion in assets, consisting mainly of short-term Treasury bills. Quantitative easing added another $3.6 trillion, all in long-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. When its unwinding ends in September, the Fed’s assets will still top $3.8 trillion.

Fed officials were once proud of the Fed’s lean, clean portfolio: “lean” because it was small relative to the size of the U.S. economy; “clean” because it was free of risky, including long-term, assets. Having it so, a 2002 Fed study said, kept the central bank from interfering with “relative asset values and credit allocation within the private sector.” That decision kept the Fed clear of fiscal policy, leaving support for particular markets, such as housing, and responsibility for funding the government entirely to the Treasury and Congress.

But today, the Fed’s willingness to hold on to the massive reserves, coupled with its ability to gobble up debt — including government debt — without fueling inflation, make it harder for Fed officials to resist a Republican administration’s own call for renewed quantitative easing. Instead of more “quantitative tightening,” Trump said in April, the Fed “should actually now be quantitative easing. … You would see a rocket ship.” Fed officials might scoff at Trump’s rocket ship analogy, but they can no longer claim that caving in to his demands would mean losing their ability to control inflation.

Trump is not the only politician Fed officials have to worry about: Politicians of either party are equally likely to lean on it. While Republicans are learning to love the Fed’s printing press — not one Republican senator scolded Powell for the Fed’s decision to stop raising interest rates and prematurely end its unwind — Democrats see more quantitative easing as a painless way to finance their own favorite projects. Instead of being a fluke, in other words, Trump’s call for more quantitative easing may turn out to be a taste of things to come.

by George Selgin, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Mark Wilson/Getty

The “Zero Waste” People Must be Stopped

My feelings regarding the “zero-waste movement” are vast and varied, but come in many shades of upset. I’m upset when I see a friend wracked with guilt when she succumbs to buying a plastic water bottle on an oppressively hot afternoon. I’m upset when a bratty roommate preaches the zero-waste gospel to me when I know they drive half a mile to work every day. I’m upset that I’m expending energy being upset over a movement that is well-intentioned instead of on one that is not.

According to the Zero Waste International Alliance, the zero-waste movement is “the conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health,” or, put more simply, consuming less shit so you have less shit to throw away. The movement has become prominent in recent years as a response to increasingly alarming news of plastic-clogged waterways, growing landfills, and insufficiently low recycling rates.

It all sounds pretty good. I am definitely a proponent of resource conservation and waste reduction. I would love for consumption to be less of a strain on the environment. My exasperation rests in the gap between this definition and its real-life execution, which seems to be focused primarily on one type of waste: household plastic.

Before we go any further, let’s talk about the problem with the word “zero” in zero-waste movement. Perhaps if the name was “less-waste movement” or “not-as-much-waste movement” or something equally pragmatic, I wouldn’t be so bothered. But, and I’m sorry to have to say this, the “zero” in zero-waste is impossible first and foremost due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the quality of energy degrades as it is used. Your banana will either be eaten and partially excreted by you or left to rot somewhere; neither is zero waste and entropy is undeniable. Therefore, discussions about waste should be framed around reduction, not some fundamentally unattainable “zero.” This sets everyone up for failure, making the movement fertile grounds for some of the same damaging psychology present in movements like “clean eating.”

Next on my list of grievances is how gender and zero-waste intersect. A casual glance at the #zerowaste hashtag on Instagram or at the author bio pages of numerous zero-waste blogs will highlight how feminine this movement skews. I suspect this movement is prone to an even larger gender gap than other environmental initiatives due its focus on how household waste can be reduced, a domain over which women still seem to reign. This is annoying, mostly because being zero-waste is time-consuming and expensive. Living a zero-waste lifestyle involves very inconvenient things like making your own toothpaste and never ordering takeout. Moreover, it’s well-documented that men tend to recycle less, litter more, and have larger carbon footprints. I would love for men and women to at least be inconvenienced equally.

More insidiously, I am concerned that zero-waste is narrowing people’s perceptions of waste to consist only of what they physically put in the garbage. Those who write about their individual reduction efforts tend to use phrases like “plastic-free” interchangeably with “zero-waste” (exemplified in a post on the popular blog Going Zero Waste titled “3 Zero-Waste Shops for All Your Plastic-Free Needs”) These phrases are not synonymous — waste comes in many forms. And even if a business claims to be zero-waste, such can be misleading. According to a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine, there is growing tide of grocery stores that claim to be “zero waste” by selling only bulk items. But while this might mean there is no visible packing waste for the shopper, there is definitely some unseen amount of packaging with which the store itself had to contend — it’s not as if a truck of loose Brazil nuts showed up for delivery.

Zero-wasters think that producing teeny-tiny amounts of garbage — specifically, one mason jar’s worth — is the pinnacle of environmentally conscious behavior. But the notion that the packaging of your purchased end product is an accurate reflection of the waste generated in the entire production process of that item is insane. You might buy minimally packaged meat, but eating meat is one of the most wasteful consumption habits in which you can partake. While some zero-wasters proudly announce that they have avoided food packaging at the airport, one flight can negate a year’s worth of otherwise environmentally conscious behavior.

Further, there is inherent tension between packaging food to minimize food waste and the waste from the packaging itself. Compared to its sinful plastic counterpart, the virtuous glass bottle requires much more packaging to not break in transit. The plastics industry itself was borne from repurposing the waste from petroleum refining; the affordability of plastic goods, from kitchenware to clothing, has democratized consumption and blurred class lines, facilitating social mobility for many and ultimately leading to a more sustainable (ahem, less wasteful) use of human capital. (...)

The whole point is that the stuff shouldn’t be made in the first place, or that the environmental externalities of those items should be forcibly internalized so that prices spike precipitously. If purchasing more items — like a plastic-free toilet brush or Goop-sanctioned “Zero Waste Starter Kit” — makes you feel like you are helping the environment, perhaps ask yourself why.

by Tara Conway, The Outline |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not to mention all those Amazon boxes.]

Miley Cyrus, Swae Lee, Mike WiLL

Miley Cyrus: She Is Coming review – pop chameleon finds her true colours (The Guardian)

Molecules of US Freedom

US Department of Energy is now referring to fossil fuels as “freedom gas” (Ars Technica)

In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms "freedom gas" and "molecules of US freedom" to replace your average, everyday term "natural gas."
Image: Craig Hartley/Bloomberg via Getty Image

[ed. A for effort.]

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), Bathing in the River
via: